I'm an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at RIT, where I research juicy tales, personal political dilemmas, and media frenzies. Since my doctoral dissertation, I've focused on political sex scandals, their gendered elements and the overly gleeful news coverage that ensues - but in the past two years I've moved toward studying the personal impacts of the 2016 presidential election inside the homes of Americans and those who live in the U.S. As an essayist, I write about quiet moments that demand our attention.

As a filmmaker I lean toward the personal. I'm the producer behind "The Upside Down Book," an award-winning documentary that investigates the origins of a copy of Mein Kampf that my great uncle brought home from Europe as a Jewish-American soldier during WWII. The documentary is based on a series of articles I wrote for the Boston Globe in 2010. Matt White of 4th Coast Productions and I filmed in Germany, France and Boston. Check out the film's IMDb page, along with its website, for the trailer, photographs and news.

More recently, and following the pussyhat explosion that caused a worldwide shortage of yarn following the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, I've begun to explore the metaphor of yarn to our social "fabric." My fourth book, "Crafting Dissent" is now under contract with Rowman & Littlefield. My personal work with yarn sees it as a thread to the Abolitionist and Suffragist legacies in Rochester, New York.